Finding Roots in China’s Soil September 19, 2006

Found this article from 2001 about visits to China that traces geneology that stirred my heart and for our reclamation of our cultural identities as part of our healing. Here is a pic that I found on the net that matched my thoughts on this.

(01-21) 04:00 PDT Guangdong province, China — It floated effortlessly through the air, the dots on its wings creating a white streak. “Look at the butterfly,” Al Cheng said, recognizing the symbolism even before it landed on Eric Joe’s right foot.

In Chinese folk tales, a black butterfly is a reincarnation of someone who has died and come back to see the living. Joe was visiting the ancestral home of his father’s family and the memorial marker of his great-great-grandfather.

“I got chills when it landed on me,” Joe said. “It popped back up and landed on my left foot, and I felt the same chills up my spine again.”

He went to China as part of “In Search of Roots,” a genealogy program for Chinese Americans in the Bay Area that includes a three-week trip, led by Cheng, to visit the ancestral homes of its 10 participants.

Joe, 25, is the first in his immediate family to return to the village in Kaiping (pronounced hoi-ping in Cantonese) county since 1950.

Some Roots participants, like Joe, want to know their family history. Others are also drawn to the program by gnawing questions about their place in America’s “melting pot.” Who am I and where do I fit in? Am I Chinese, American or both? What does it mean to be American if your ancestors didn’t cross the Atlantic Ocean?

Roots marks its 10th anniversary — and the Lunar New Year — on Jan. 27 with an exhibit of photo collages from the 2000 trip. The show will be at San Francisco’s Chinese Culture Center, which runs the program with the Chinese Historical Society of America.

The butterfly’s visit was fresh in Joe’s mind as he and Cheng led the group through rice fields to a memorial site for Jew Ah Soong, Joe’s great-great- grandfather. Family legend has it that a black butterfly followed Joe’s uncle when he visited the site in 1990.

After clearing away weeds, Joe knelt down and

placed incense at the stone, perched on a lush, green hillside. He took a few steps back and bowed in prayer. “It didn’t feel like I was going to be emotional, then Al (Cheng) patted me on the back, and I just let it out.” Tears streamed down his face.

For Joe, a Fremont resident who grew up in El Cerrito, the trip to China was “the best experience” of his life, and made him appreciate the hardships his ancestors endured. “The dream was for the future generation,” he said.

“Seeing the rice fields, I kept thinking that could easily be us, working sun-up to sundown.”

Jew spent time in the United States during the 1860s, returned to China and died after going back to America in the early 1900s. His body was never sent back to China.

Joe’s father, Jeff, was born in Lianjiangli (lin-gong-lei) and has not been back to China since coming to the United States at age 15 in 1950. Like most ancestral villages the group would visit, Lianjiangli is a rural farming area.

In a nearby paddy, a barefoot woman works in ankle-deep mud. She trudges forward in a stoop, grabbing greenish-yellow stems topped with brown flecks.

With a swift stroke of a sickle, she cuts bundle after bundle of the stalks.

Most in the Roots group are drenched with sweat, and all they are doing is watching the woman.

Walking a dirt path through a rice paddy, the Roots participants are obvious foreigners, dressed in shorts and T-shirts, cameras hanging from their shoulders. Middle-aged women pass in the opposite direction, carrying rice straw hung in big bundles from a bamboo pole slung across their shoulders.

“It’s like we were in a time warp,” said Iris Chin, 20, a UC Berkeley student and fellow Roots traveler. “People actually live it. It’s real.”

Roots is open to Bay Area residents ages 16 to 30 who trace their family history to the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong, which surrounds Hong Kong and has been sending immigrants to the United States for more than 150 years. Most participants don’t speak Cantonese, the dialect of Guangdong. Many have lost, or never had, a connection to their family’s past or to China.

Participants “are not any less American because they are Chinese,” said Him Mark Lai, who coordinates Roots with Cheng and has taught Chinese American history at San Francisco State and the University of California at Berkeley. “Their heritage is just as valid. Certainly they can’t identify with the Mayflower and that history. Unfortunately, it takes a program like this to help them reconcile this.”

Most people who have gone through Roots are in their late teens and early 20s.

“The struggle around identity is something most college-age kids go through, ” said Teresa Mok (no relation to the author), a clinical counselor who coordinates Asian Pacific American outreach at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “For Asian Americans and other minorities, this struggle is compounded by race.”

To face up to discrimination, an identity infused with pride and knowledge of the past must be nurtured. For Cheng, that’s the point of the Roots program.

“The more you understand who you are, it doesn’t matter what kind of racist or offensive things people throw at you,” said Wilson Woo, 25, of San Francisco, another Roots participant. “You know the truth inside.”

Roots started in 1990 as a way for the Chinese Culture Center to expand its offerings to young people. About 100 people have participated in the past decade.

Each year about 20 applicants apply for Roots. The 10 chosen pay $450 tuition and air fare to Hong Kong. Participants start in February with twice-a- month Saturday workshops, where they learn about genealogy research and Chinese American history. They interview family members about ancestors and relatives.

They also visit the National Archives and Records Administration office in San Bruno, where the records of 250,000 Chinese immigrants are stored. Most pertain to arrivals between 1882 and 1943, who were detained and interrogated on Angel Island because immigration was restricted by the Chinese Exclusion Act. Its immigration station is another stop before participants leave for China in July.

The interns then assemble a family tree. Their research is forwarded to China, where the Guangdong branch of the government’s Overseas Chinese Affairs Office provides transportation, lodging, and locates relatives and villages — relying on local residents because there are no accurate, reliable maps of the rural areas.

Before going to China, Kristen Fong, 17, said she was “perfectly happy living in a whitewashed world.” But seeing the villages where her grandparents lived changed how the college freshman views the world.

Fong’s paternal grandfather grew up in Xiao Hoa Chong (dai-hou-choong), a village in Doumen (do-mun) county in southwestern Guangdong.

On this day, the sun’s rays feel like fire, and the air is thick. Alleys are lined with 450-year-old cut stones. Some homes are built upon a low-rising hill. Stone pathways rise up as well, with drainage gutters running beside them. Storefronts line the main alley, leading to a central marketplace.

It’s a common practice for overseas Chinese to send money back for schools, roads and other improvements. A picture of Fong’s paternal grandfather, Stephen Fong, hangs alongside a photo of former U.S. Sen. Hiram Fong of Hawaii at a middle school where they were benefactors.

“Now, actually seeing (the village), it’s more real,” said Fong, who also visited her maternal village in Taishan (toi-saan) county. “Actually seeing where they lived . . .”

Xiao Hoa Chong is about as far as you can get from Redwood Shores in San Mateo County, where Fong grew up. The Fongs are the only Asian American family on their street.

“Hanging around with Caucasian people, you kind of adopt their ideology,” Fong said. “You hear racist jokes and stuff . . . you just kind of accept it.”

People like Fong are products of assimilation. There is pressure to shed the family’s culture in order to become “American,” though racism and discrimination often preclude full acceptance. But when they become Americanized, they don’t fit in with their parents’ or grandparents’ culture either, as is the case with many Roots participants.

“Some have no idea about their Chinese heritage,” Cheng said. “Some are even ashamed of their Chinese background.”

For Fong, Roots was the first time she interacted extensively with other Chinese people — those in the group and the locals in China.

“I had this image of Chinese people as all studious, boring. The ones at my (high) school were like that,” said Fong, now a freshman at the University of the Pacific in Stockton. After the trip, she realized her stereotype “was completely wrong.”

“Now I’ve had a taste what other Chinese people are like, and they’re actually a lot like me,” Fong said.

Korey Lee’s branch of the Soo family began leaving Guangdong in the 19th century, fanning out with the rest of the Chinese diaspora, some settling in Hong Kong and others in the United States.

The 17-year-old from Mountain View was the first in his family to return in five generations.

Lee’s mother, Judi, knew almost nothing about her family’s past, not even the name of her father’s village in Zhuhai (gee-hoi) county. Luckily, information about the village was published by the Chinese Times of San Francisco in the obituary for Korey Lee’s grandfather, Soo Gon Min, who died in 1971 at 75.

As with most days on the trip, it’s hot and muggy. The stop at Lee’s paternal village in Beishan (baak-saan) will be the last of the trip.

Lee stares solemnly at an empty piece of ground, overgrown with weeds and shrubs. The house where his maternal great-great-grandparents lived once stood on this spot. It is now gone, and only one 80-year-old elder can remember the Soos.

As the group walks away, a guide from the local Overseas Chinese Affairs Office spots the outline of a house foundation under a thin layer of dirt. Lee digs with his bare hands. Digging deeper and faster, Lee unearths a piece of the foundation. He clutches it and stares intently before dropping it into his backpack.

“It was something tangible that I could hold onto. It’s something more than a souvenir,” Lee said after coming home. “It brings that connection back to my past. It’s just kind of cool to think about, and think that my ancestors once lived within these stones, these bricks.”

Knowledge of a past was what Lee was looking for. He also visited his father’s village in Taishan.

“There are two precious things parents give to their children,” Cheng said, just after leaving Lee’s village. “Roots to stand on and wings to fly.”

Those lessons and a newfound appreciation for family are what will stick with Joe.

“Family is really the most important thing. I’ve always put work pretty high, not necessarily consciously, but it has always been a priority,” said Joe, a software engineer in San Francisco.

Since returning from China, he has changed priorities. “I do more with my family and friends.”

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In Decembert 2005 three of my children left Auckland New Zealand to return to their Wong ancestral village of Gwa liang, in the Zengcheng Province. The managed to locate their Grandfather’s house, locked up for more than 60 years. – abandoned during the Japanese war. This generation should take the time to return, and recognise the hardships that our ancestors endured to give us the western life of today.

my father was born in 1895 in canton, china.
name:Ong Jeong Poy, worked as chinese interpreter U.S. Immigration service 35 years.attended Berkely college , bay area California. served in U.S. Army during (ww-1) world war one. would like to find relatives.